Jill Bell's typefaces are energetic, highly decorative, and refreshingly unpredictable. Some are friendly and childlike, while others are rough and nervous. Her latest creation is ITC Swank, a connected script whose shabby-chic" sophistication communicates a worn elegance. Bell begins the design process "with black stuff on white paper," she explains, preferring to draw letters before she digitizes them. Often the inspiration for her typefaces comes from a piece of hand-lettering. "Bruno began as a reminder to buy cat food," she says, "and ITC Swank started out as a small bit of lettering for Wurlitzer Pianos." Bell finds that working with blocks of lettering is a good start for script typefaces. "If I'm drawing a script typeface, I have to write out sentences in the letters first," she explains. "Drawing each letter separately doesn't establish the flow and spontaneity that scripts deserve." Bell's newest design is ITC Swank. It's a somewhat tattered formal script with definite links to early copperplate scripts. Though probably not for wedding invitations, Swank's elegant underpinnings are evident, with its slightly narrow proportions and a baseline that can best be called "bouncy." Graphic designers will appreciate the abundance of swash letters, making it easy to create distinctive headlines and short blocks of copy. Bell has a fondness for the "open, genuine" quality of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. "Eastern styles incorporate the natural flow of the hand," she says. "Natural, human qualities shine through. Mistakes are accepted, not scorned as in the 'white-out' Western culture." This philosophy is evident in Bell's own designs. Whether it's ITC Clover 's carefree spirit, the slightly spooky Hollyweird, Caribbean 's< rustic charm or the weathered elegance of ITC Swank, there is a natural honesty in her work."

Angel Koziupa was drawing letters for labels since forty years ago, now he meets SudTipos and his beautiful works could be used around the world. Murga is a dance, it’s Latin, it’s carnival....

Daniel Berkeley Updike seems to have stimulated the architect Bertram G. Goodhue to design the prototype in 1896 for Ingalls Kimball at the Cheltenham Press. Six years later Morris Fuller Benton at ATF developed it into the design and then the series that we know today. “Owing to certain eccentricities of form,” writes Updike, “it cannot be read comfortably for any length of time.” But he concludes: “It is, however, an exceedingly handsome letter for ephemeral printing.” Mergenthaler bought composing machine rights to the original design c. 1896, but bought the Benton design in 1904.

Franz Kafka’s manuscripts have always been a source of inspiration for designer Julia Sysmäläinen. At first she was just interested in literary aspects but later she noticed that content and visual form can not be separated in the work of this ingenious writer. Analyzing Kafka’s handwriting at the Berlin National Library, Julia was inspired to design the typeface FF Mister – by now a well known classic. Over the years, FF Mister K became a handsome typeface family and even produced offspring: the Josef K Patterns. Some of Kafka’s most expressive letterforms were the starting point for these decorative ornaments. How do the Patterns work? Outlines and fillings correspond to the uppercase and the lowercase letters on your keyboard. You can use them separately or layer them on top of each other. If you write a line of “pattern-text” in lowercase and repeat it underneath in uppercase you get a row of fillings followed by a row of outlines. Now you can color them and then set line space = 0 to get a single line of layered colored ornaments. Alternatively, activating OpenType / stylistic set / stylistic alternates will also unite the two lines to a single layered line. Further magic can be done with OpenType / contextual alternates turned on. On the gallery page of this font family is a downloadable Josef K Patterns.pdf with an alphabetical overview of forms. Hundreds of patterns are possible … we’d love to see some of yours and present them here on the website!

ITC Kendo is the work of British designer Phill Grimshaw, suggesting the dash and verve of quick, sketchy calligraphy, complete with splatters of ink. Grimshaw says he worked deliberately against his own habits to create the forms, drawing the letters with slow deliberation" and a pointed pen. He overloaded the pen with ink and drew on rough paper, "applying a lot of pressure at the beginning of a stroke and easing off towards the terminals. Accidental splashes occurred frequently owing to the nib catching the 'tooth' of the paper." Those splashes were refined into features which enhance but do not overwhelm the characters and carefully worked so as not to leave an obvious white strip of unsplattered space between lines and letters. The initial capitals can be used alone or combined with the lowercase alphabet, and the font includes a full set of f-ligatures and some extra ligatures as well as decorative elements."

Ishtar was the Babylonian goddess of war, fertility, love and sex - all in all a lethal combination. She wasn't the sweetheart her lovers had hoped for; I guess the 'war' part in her resume is a dead give-away. Ishtar font is no sweetheart either: it doesn't have a real baseline and its spooky character might not be everyone's cup of tea. It does have a certain charm, however, and befitting a Babylonian goddess, it comes with Babylonian language support!

My son Sam turned 12 and all of a sudden he cares for his hairdo. It needs to be just so, not too long, not too short, with a lot of gel to hold it in place. ;-) He just had a haircut when I was creating this font, so now you know where the Haircut part comes from. The Holistic part is something that sort of sounded ok. Holistic Haircut is a nice, handmade display font. It comes with wider and narrower glyphs for the upper and lower case AND a set of alternates that likes to party with the rest.

The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 ms3nd; modern Arabic: الْمُسْنَد musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the 9th century BCE. It was used for writing the Old South Arabian languages Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramautic, Minaean, and Hasaitic, and the Ethiopic language Ge'ez in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the script date to the 9th century BCE in Yemen. There are no letters for vowels, which are marked by matres lectionis. Its mature form was reached around 800 BCE, and its use continued until the 6th century CE, including Ancient North Arabian inscriptions in variants of the alphabet, when it was displaced by the Arabic alphabet In Ethiopia and Eritrea, it evolved later into the Ge'ez script, which, with added symbols throughout the centuries, has been used to write Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre, as well as other languages (including various Semitic, Cushitic, and Nilo-Saharan languages).

ROARRR! THE STYLES -Pantera Pro is the most complete style, and although its default look is mono-rhythmic it gets really playful and crazy like the examples of the posters by just activating the Decorative Ligatures button in the Open-type Panel of Adobe Illustrator. However, I recommend using also the Glyphs Panel because there you'll find much more variants per letter. Pantera Pro is in fact, coded in a way the combination of thicknesses will always look fantastic. -Pantera Black Left, and Pantera Black Right are actually “lite” versions of Pantera Pro: They have very little Open-Type code, so what you see here is what you get. Pantera Black Left has its left strokes thick, while Pantera Black Right has its right strokes thick. -Pantera White is a lovely member in this family that looks lighter and airy, hence its name. With the feature Standard Ligatures activated (liga) the font gets very playful. -Pantera Caps is based on sign painters lettering and since it follows the same pointed brush rules as the other styles, it matches perfectly. -Pantera Claws like its name suggests, is a set of icons that were done by our dear panther. THE STORY It is said that typography can never be as expressive as calligraphy, but sometimes it can get close enough. I tend to think that calligraphic trials, in order to work well as potential fonts, need first to go through very strict filters before going digital: While calligraphy is synonym of freedom (once its rules are mastered), type-design, in the other hand, has its battlefield a little tighter and tougher. When I practice pointed brush lettering, there are so many things happening on the paper. And most of them are delicious. The ones who know my work may see that although many of my fonts are very expressive, my handmade brush trials are much more lively than them. With that in mind, this time I tried to go further and rescue more of those things that are lost in the process of thinking type when first sketches are calligraphic. I wondered if I could create something wild, hence its name Panther, by understanding the randomness that sometimes calligraphy conveys and turning it to something systemic: With Pantera, I created an ordered disorder. Like it happens a lot in many kinds of lettering styles, in order to enrich the written word the scribe mixes the thickness of the strokes and the width of the letters. Like one of my favorite mentors say (1), they make thoughtful gestures Some lively strokes go down with a thick, while some do that with a thin. Some letters are very narrow, meaning some of them will need to be very wide to compensate. Why not?. The calligrapher is always thinking on the following letters, and he/she designs in his head the combination of thicks and thins before he/she executes them. He/she knows the playful rhythm the words will have before writing them. It takes time and skill to master this and achieve graceful results. Going back to the font, in Pantera, this combination of varying thicknesses and widths of letters were Open-Type coded so the user will see satisfactory results by just enabling or disabling some buttons on the glyphs panel. I'm very pleased with the result since it’s not very easy to find fonts which play with the words' rhythm like Pantera does, following of course, a strong calligraphic base. I believe that if you were on the prowl for innovative fonts, this is your chance to go wild and get Pantera! NOTES (1) Phrase by Yves Leterme. In fact, it’s the title of a book by him. EPILOGUE Esta fuente está dedicada a mi panterita

RRollie is a typeface family inspired on the proportions of the Roman capital in the Augusto's age, some of them can be seen in inscriptions of Pompeii; in this particular case, it has taken an inscription from a tomb of the year 15 AD. The subtlety of the serif is hardly insinuates, helping to strut the terminals of the stems. Ascenders and descenders are very short. The thickness variation is presented quite delicate, highlighting the light-dark passage and even the agile counterblocks of the typeface. These fonts can be used in many kind of graphic works by its strong personality, visual impact and readability. This font family include OpenType features: Standard and discretionary ligatures, small caps, case sensitive from, old style figures, tabular, diacritics for western languages and many others. Roberto Rollie (1935-2003) was an outstanding professional of Graphic Design, Photography and Visual Artist. He was involved in the creation of the career of Visual Communication Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts (National University of La Plata, Argentina), in the late '60s; he was a pioneer and great teacher too, who loved the Roman Capitals for its subtle and balanced design, especially for high readability and clever design. Those who, like me, knew him as a person and teacher, we are deeply grateful for having received their warmth and enthusiasm for graphic design.

Calligrapher Margaret Layson works in partnership with Australian typographer Harry Pears, bringing designs such as the wonderful Lindisfarne Nova family to life. They both work on the digital incarnation in a true collaboration. Originally from the UK, Margaret began her professional career as a geophysicist. After arriving in Australia in 1968, she began to work as a freelance calligrapher. Over the years she has maintained an interest in the history of writing, particularly the scripts and decorations in manuscripts.

Based upon CA BND (the clean version) CA BND Trash is a rough and dirty version of our favorite DIN-like font. We recommend it for use in zombie movies title design, headlines for ads of a soft-drink manufacturer (who hopes to be cooler, if he uses rough typefaces), or for emocore, hardcore, softcore or "whatever-core" bands. Uhhh, its the time for the living dead.

Peter Schmidt, well-known designer from Hamburg, browsed in a fashion magazine on a return flight from the United States. At that time he was thinking about a logo for a philharmonic orchestra. In the magazine, he noticed some interesting typography. He removed the page from the magazine and sent it later to Peter Langpeter. That was the inspiration for the creation of the logo. Since Peter Langpeter really liked the classic aesthetics of the resulting letters, he developed a whole new alphabet of it. Initially, only capital letters. Now he has completed this exceptionally beautiful font.

The branding agency's client wanted an ultra modern"" typeface that was ""futuristic without being gimmicky or ephemeral,"" according to the design brief. Designer Sebastian Lester took on this intriguing custom font assignment, but soon, a bureaucratic decision cancelled the project. ""I was left with a sketchbook full of ideas and thought it would be a shame not to see what came of them,"" says Lester. He decided to finish the design on his own. Lester's research confirmed that the principal ingredient of an ""ultra modern"" typeface was simplicity of character structure: a carefully drawn, monoline form, open letter shapes and smooth, strong curves. To conceive a typeface that crossed the line from modern to futuristic, Lester decided to amplify these qualities. About a year after Lester's initial conceptual work, two highly functional and versatile typefaces emerged. These are Neo Sans and Neo Tech, designs Lester describes as ""legible without being neutral, nuanced without being fussy, and expressive without being distracting."" Both the Neo Sans and the more-minimalist Neo Tech families are available in six weights, ranging from Light to Ultra. Each has a companion italic, and Neo Tech offers a suite of alternate characters. While engineered to look modern as tomorrow, Neo Sans and Neo Tech display the functional and aesthetic excellence that earns them a place in the list of classic designs from the Monotype typeface library.

The branding agency's client wanted an ultra modern"" typeface that was ""futuristic without being gimmicky or ephemeral,"" according to the design brief. Designer Sebastian Lester took on this intriguing custom font assignment, but soon, a bureaucratic decision cancelled the project. ""I was left with a sketchbook full of ideas and thought it would be a shame not to see what came of them,"" says Lester. He decided to finish the design on his own. Lester's research confirmed that the principal ingredient of an ""ultra modern"" typeface was simplicity of character structure: a carefully drawn, monoline form, open letter shapes and smooth, strong curves. To conceive a typeface that crossed the line from modern to futuristic, Lester decided to amplify these qualities. About a year after Lester's initial conceptual work, two highly functional and versatile typefaces emerged. These are Neo Sans and Neo Tech, designs Lester describes as ""legible without being neutral, nuanced without being fussy, and expressive without being distracting."" Both the Neo Sans and the more-minimalist Neo Tech families are available in six weights, ranging from Light to Ultra. Each has a companion italic, and Neo Tech offers a suite of alternate characters. While engineered to look modern as tomorrow, Neo Sans and Neo Tech display the functional and aesthetic excellence that earns them a place in the list of classic designs from the Monotype typeface library.

Fortuna has some resemblance with handtexted characters based, loosely, on the classic italic. But, like Ad Hoc, Fortuna is drawn on a monitor in every detail. The name is Latin and means fate, luck. The composer Carl Orff was actual at the time when I worked with Fortuna, because he had been born 100 years earlier. Orff's Carmina Burana were being introduced on the radio when I was wondering what to call my most recent creation. The song cycle begins with a song to Fortuna: a fated choice of name. Fortuna was released in 1995.

LisaBeth Weber's eponymous typeface ITC Weber Hand is deceptively simple-looking. It's a handwriting face in a light, monolineal style with a slightly formal, almost angular appearance. Weber, who is an accomplished singer/songwriter as well as an artist and lettering artist, says she has always had an inherent sensibility with lettering." Her favorite subject in the first grade was penmanship, and when, as an adult, she got her first checkbook, "I thought it was very unfair that the signature always had to be consistently the same." She describes Weber Hand as "a natural progression of my handwriting style, a friendly and versatile font." Its letterfit is naturally loose, and it shows its character best when set with ample leading. In 1999, when LisaBeth Weber's ITC Weber Hand™ typeface was released, it soon became one of ITC's most popular handwriting fonts. A decade later she decided that is was time to update her single-weight design. A light weight would benefit from a bold companion, in addition to condensed variations for much greater versatility. This warm, friendly, and charming design is just as at home in Restaurant menus as it is in brochures, for advertising, and on packaging. With the new weights ITC Weber Hand will surely continue to be a popular handwriting type with broad appeal."

Call me some kind of weird, but I find designing fonts about the most fun you can have out of bed. Legible-scmedgible, sometimes you just have follow the font muse regardless of where she takes you. She threw me a circle, a triangle, a rounded stroke and a rounded-cornered square; “Make glyphs,” she sang. Okay! Is it legible? Yes. Is it readable? Kinda. For the right project, though, that’s enough!

Modern simple typeface expressing sharp and bright words without need for writing something really smart. Made by Dusan Jelesijevic one day when he left without anything smart to say or write, so he just grabbed a pencil and forced the paper to be cooperative. Someone said that this typeface looks like the ancient Greeks went in present future and used contemporary equipment for writing those letters. It is ideal for branding and avantgarde identities.

How can we possibly call our line of celebrity fonts the MASTERS OF COMIC BOOK ART if it doesn't include a font based on the remarkable work of comic’s renaissance gentleman, artist/writer/colorist/letterer, Dave Gibbons?! Based on Dave’s easy-on-the-eye hand lettering, this is the font Dave himself uses to letter projects such as STAR WARS: VADER'S QUEST, MARTHA WASHINGTON & BATMAN: BLACK & WHITE. Other guys may imitate him, but the original is still the greatest! Get in with the In Crowd and check out the font created by Mister Fontastic for Dave Gibbons Original Graphic Novel, The, ah, The Originals. Yes, Dave Gibbons now comes in lower case, it’s not just what he does when he gets back from the off license. Be sure and pick up The Originals from Amazon -- now available in paperback, and probably still available as a hard case, much like Dave. After the crack about the beer above, I'm guessing you'll find me with a broken spine in the remainder pile. See the family related to Dave Gibbons: Dave Gibbons Journal & Dave Gibbons Lower .

Dandygal is wild and unpredictable, but she still does the works with rich text or just headlines - without overdoing the sillyness!

Designed at ParaType in 1989 by Alexander Tarbeev. A modern replica of the typeface by Giambattista Bodoni, the Italian punchcutter and typographer of the late 18th century. Bodoni was a director of printing house of Duke of Parma in Italy. His early types were based on those of Fournier and Didot, but he developed the designs to become what are now considered to be the first modern typefaces. His letters have strong vertical stress, sharply contrasting thick and thin strokes and unbracketed hairline serifs. The contrast of thick and thin in Bodoni typefaces can produce a sparkling effect on a page: should be carefully used in texts; good for headlines and display. Condensed and decorative styles were added in 1993–97.

The ten font Turbinado™ Set was designed to be clear and easy to read with a friendly personality, ideal for advertising and packaging in both text and display settings. Included are three weights of brushed casual script, each with a dry version, two condensed all caps faces, another hand printed caps face and an Elements package with 100 brushed elements that include swashes, botanicals, shells, arrows, repeatable patterns and a few other doodads that play well with the fonts. Like our most recent release Fave, all of the fonts use the OpenType standard ligature feature to automatically differentiate consecutive lowercase letters and numbers, using separate glyphs rather than a single ligature so they can be set on a curve or colored separately, etc. They also automatically differentiate like characters that are separated by another letter when standard ligatures is enabled. The script fonts have alternate characters like swash glyphs for ends of words and a few ligatures too; single crossbar to unite the At and Att letter combinations etc. The two condensed faces also have a third set of less uniform glyphs that can be used to create a more quirky, fun and bouncy effect (see the ‘she sells seashells’ graphic above) when the discretionary ligature feature is on. The script fonts have 10+ lowercase t (and double t) crossbar alternates that can be selected from the OpenType glyph table manually, or you can enable the contextual alternates feature to automatically insert a bigger crossbar as the surrounding letters allow throughout a text box or document. Hello? Are you still there? :) And for those intrepid typographers who would rather fashion their own lowercase t to custom fit a specific design, all of the lowercase t ascenders and crossbars are also available separately in the glyph table, and can be combined manually.

Steinweiss Script began its journey towards daylight when Michael Doret was asked by Taschen Publishing to do cover lettering for the huge commemorative edition they were putting together on the work of Alex Steinweiss—“The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover”. The lettering was to be created to appear similar to the famous “Steinweiss Scrawl” the calligraphy that Steinweiss had used on countless album covers. While designing this piece of lettering, Michael realized that there was great potential for a font that was designed in the spirit of that famous “scrawl”. Through his contacts at Taschen Publishing, he was fortunate enough to be able to contact the Steinweiss family, and get the official Steinweiss approval to proceed with his “Steinweiss Script” project. Michael decided that in addition to giving the font his name as an homage, that he would donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this font to the man himself: Alex Steinweiss. Read more about the background of Steinweiss Script in Steven Heller’s article in Imprint. Steinweiss Script is a family of fonts in three weights: Light, Medium, and Bold. Additionally, within each weight there are three variations: Simple, Fancy, and Titling. These variations relate to the size/ratio of the caps to the lowercase, the complexity of those caps, and the size of the ascenders/descenders on the lowercase characters. These variations add usefulness to the font, making it accessible not just for headlines, but for longer passages of text as well. For a better understanding of its unique features please download The Steinweiss Script Users Guide from the Gallery section. PLEASE NOTE: the three Steinweiss Script fonts are cross-platform fonts which depend to some extent on certain advanced OpenType features, therefore they can be used to their full potential only with programs that support those features. When setting Steinweiss Script one should almost ALWAYS select the “Standard Ligatures" and “Contextual Alternates” buttons in your OpenType palette. See the “Read Me First!” file in the Gallery section.

The famous roman type cut in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, and used in 1470 for his printing of the tract, De Evangelica Praeparatione, Eusebius, has usually been declared the seminal and definitive representative of a class of types known as Venetian Old Style. The Jenson type is thought to have been the primary model for types that immediately followed. Subsequent 15th-century Venetian Old Style types, cut by other punchcutters in Venice and elsewhere in Italy, are also worthy of study, but have been largely neglected by 20th-century type designers. There were many versions of Venetian Old Style types produced in the final quarter of the quattrocento. The exact number is unknown, but numerous printed examples survive, though the actual types, matrices, and punches are long gone. All these types are not, however, conspicuously Jensonian in character. Each shows a liberal amount of individuality, inconsistency, and eccentricity. My fascination with these historical types began in the 1970s and eventually led to the production of my first text typeface, Iowan Old Style (Bitstream, 1991). Sometime in the early 1990s, I started doodling letters for another Venetian typeface. The letters were pieced together from sections of circles and squares. The n, a standard lowercase control character in a text typeface, came first. Its most unusual feature was its head serif, a bisected quadrant of a circle. My aim was to see if its sharp beak would work with blunt, rectangular, foot serifs. Next, I wanted to see if I could construct a set of capital letters by following a similar design system. Rectangular serifs, or what we today call "slab serifs," were common in early roman printing types, particularly text types cut in Italy before 1500. Slab serifs are evident on both lowercase and uppercase characters in roman types of the Incunabula period, but they are seen mainly at the feet of the lowercase letters. The head serifs on lowercase letters of early roman types were usually angled. They were not arched, like mine. Oddly, there seems to be no actual historical precedent for my approach. Another characteristic of my arched serif is that the side opposite the arch is flat, not concave. Arched, concave serifs were used extensively in early italic types, a genre which first appeared more than a quarter century after roman types. Their forms followed humanistic cursive writing, common in Italy since before movable type was used there. Initially, italic characters were all lowercase, set with upright capitals (a practice I much admire and would like to see revived). Sloped italic capitals were not introduced until the middle of the sixteenth century, and they have very little to do with the evolution of humanist scripts. In contrast to the cursive writing on which italic types were based, formal book hands used by humanist scholars to transcribe classical texts served as a source of inspiration for the lowercase letters of the first roman types cut in Italy. While book hands were not as informal as cursive scripts, they still had features which could be said to be more calligraphic than geometric in detail. Over time, though, the copied vestiges of calligraphy virtually disappeared from roman fonts, and type became more rational. This profound change in the way type developed was also due in part to popular interest in the classical inscriptions of Roman antiquity. Imperial Roman letters, or majuscules, became models for the capital letters in nearly all early roman printing types. So it was, that the first letters in my typeface arose from pondering how shapes of lowercase letters and capital letters relate to one another in terms of classical ideals and geometric proportions, two pinnacles in a range of artistic notions which emerged during the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, such ideas are interesting to explore, but in the field of type design they often lead to dead ends. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that pure geometry, as a strict approach to type design, has limitations. No roman alphabet, based solely on the circle and square, has ever been ideal for continuous reading. This much, I knew from the start. In the course of developing my typeface for text, innumerable compromises were made. Even though the finished letterforms retain a measure of geometric structure, they were modified again and again to improve their performance en masse. Each modification caused further deviation from my original scheme, and gave every font a slightly different direction. In the lower case letters especially, I made countless variations, and diverged significantly from my original plan. For example, not all the arcs remained radial, and they were designed to vary from font to font. Such variety added to the individuality of each style. The counters of many letters are described by intersecting arcs or angled facets, and the bowls are not round. In the capitals, angular bracketing was used practically everywhere stems and serifs meet, accentuating the terseness of the characters. As a result of all my tinkering, the entire family took on a kind of rich, familiar, coarseness - akin to roman types of the late 1400s. In his book, Printing Types D. B. Updike wrote: "Almost all Italian roman fonts in the last half of the fifteenth century had an air of "security" and generous ease extremely agreeable to the eye. Indeed, there is nothing better than fine Italian roman type in the whole history of typography." It does seem a shame that only in the 20th century have revivals of these beautiful types found acceptance in the English language. For four centuries (circa 1500 - circa 1900) Venetian Old Style faces were definitely not in favor in any living language. Recently, though, reinterpretations of early Italian printing types have been returning with a vengeance. The name Vendetta, which as an Italian sound I like, struck me as being a word that could be taken to signifiy a comeback of types designed in the Venetian style. In closing, I should add that a large measure of Vendetta's overall character comes from a synthesis of ideas, old and new. Hallmarks of roman type design from the Incunabula period are blended with contemporary concerns for the optimal display of letterforms on computer screens. Vendetta is thus not a historical revival. It is instead an indirect but personal digital homage to the roman types of punchcutters whose work was influenced by the example Jenson set in 1470. John Downer.

The initial idea for this font came when a friend of mine asked me to create a logo for a sports team that he was forming. Since it was a martial arts competitive sport, bold and striking lettering was needed to reflect that. When the logo was finished, I was really pleased whith the letters so I decided to create the entire font. Taurunum is made with intention to be used for display design (logos, posters, etc.), and combining the weights should give best results.

Tarocco is a typical book face with good readability and rather tall x-height. The origin for this typeface is found in Nordisk Antikva. A typeface especially constructed with attention for the Swedish language. Waldemar Zachrisson was determined to realize his ideas and in 1906 he began to cooperate with the foundry Genzsch & Heyse, based in Hamburg. Some influences of Jugendt can be found and the typeface were released in 1910. It became rather popular until around 1930. The MRF version includes 7 weights all together.

The ideal typeface for cartography The Swiss designer/typographer Felix Arnold designed Cisalpin during the late 1990s, after he had challenged himself to create a contemporary typeface that could be used for cartographic uses. Arnold came to the subject of cartographic typefaces after analyzing many maps and atlases, and discovering that there was no standard typeface for these types of documents. Like any good cartographic type, Cisalpin is very legible at small sizes. While he was drawing this typeface on his computer, Arnold used a reduction glass to refine his design, making it work in these situations. Cisalpin is a linear sans serif face, with slight resemblance to renaissance serif types. The various weights are all clearly differentiated from one another. And because space is often a premium on maps, Cisalpin runs narrow. Words close in around themselves to help them become more identifiable. The letterforms in Cisalpin are durable, and can maintain their readability when placed over complex backgrounds. They have open interior forms, flattened curves, tall x-heights, and a capital height that almost reaches the tops of the ascenders. Cisalpin also has pronounced Italics, with a very clear angle of inclination. Each letterform in the family has been optimized so that they cannot be easily mistaken for another. This again helps minimize the misunderstandings that often occur because of illegibility. Although Cisalpin was developed for use in cartography, it may be used for countless other purposes; any font that can work well in small sizes on a map could be used almost anywhere else!

Frederic Goudy joined Lanston as art advisor in 1920. One of his first initiatives was to design a new version of Garamond based on original Garamond designs of 1540. Goudy intended his free-hand drawings to be cut exactly as he had drawn them and fought with the workmen at Lanston to keep them from “correcting” his work. This new type was called Garamont (an acceptable alternate spelling) to distinguish it from other Garamonds on the market. (The other Garamonds on the market at that time were later confirmed to be the work of Jean Jannon.) In 2001, Jim Rimmer digitized Garamont in two weights. The display weight is based on the actual metal outlines to compensate slightly for the ink gain that occurs with letterpress printing. The text weight is a touch heavier and more appropriate for general offset and digital text work. Digital Garamont is available to the public for the first time in 2005.

The Koelle Ornaments series is based on the etchings of Chris Koelle of Portland Studios. This is the second collaboration between insigne and Portland Studios; the first yielded the inky and active script Blue Goblet. Chris has a unique style where he "frames" his work with small icons related to the story or subject. These are now available as Koelle ornaments. Koelle Ornaments have a gritty, used appearance, and have a late 70's stylistic feel to them. There are 145 highly detailed illustrations in the entire pack, separated into four different fonts. These illustrations can be resized without any loss of quality, and can be easily converted to outlines and modified. Some of the ornaments have a Christian theme, while others are more generic. To view what ornaments are available and the keys they map to, please view the sample .pdf. The sample .pdf is an excellent reference guide, and we encourage you to print it out to quickly refer to your favorite ornaments.

Inspired by a few letters in a hand-drawn logotype, Swashington is a serif font with both an early 20th Century feel and yet is evocative of the swash fonts of the 1970s as well. The real meat of this typeface comes with using all the swash and ligature variants allowing for an enormous amount of typographic flair. Starting with the original logo, Jason Walcott was moved to develop these interesting letterforms into a full typeface with all the swashy might he could muster. In addition to a comprehensive set of Swash and Alternate letters, there are also over 270 Discretionary Ligatures that can be used to create different possibilities by mixing and matching. Included with the downloaded fonts are two .pdf files showing all the swashes and ligatures, that can be printed and used for easy reference. All of the alternates are available via the Glyph Palette or with OpenType features. The font includes support for all Latin based and Eastern European languages.

Flexion developed out of design philosophy and ambigramatic artwork of John Langdon. Based on the contents in John’s book Wordplay, author Dan Brown hired John to create ambigrams for his forthcoming novel Angels & Demons. Mr. Brown was so impressed with his work he even named the main character Robert Langdon after John. After the success of Angels & Demons, Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code. When the movie adaptation of that book was in the works, Dan suggested that John create titles for the movie based on ambigrams. John contacted Hal Taylor to create a font based on the lettering treatment to be used for the credits at the end of the movie. Unfortunately, it was decided that the film was running long and the original title concept was scrapped. By this time, Hal was well into developing a full type family, including small caps, alternate characters, lining and ranging figures. John was impressed with the way the design was turning out and decided that it had enough merit to be released as Flexion.

The hand lettered credits from the 1942 British film comedy “The Goose Steps Out” became the model for Goose Creek JNL, a simple sans serif design available in both regular and oblique versions. According to the Internet Movie Database (imdb), “A bumbling teacher turns out to be the double of a German general. He is flown into Germany to impersonate the general and cause chaos and hilarity in a Hitler Youth college.” The title is a parody of the “goosestep” style of marching by German soldiers during World War II. As a variant on the movie’s title, the font was named for Goose Creek, South Carolina – a charming community just northeast of historic Charleston.

For some time, Eric de Berranger had wanted to create a distressed typeface design - one that gave the appearance of antique printing and showed signs of wear, yet was still highly readable. He was busy designing a new face called Maxime, when an idea struck: I realized that I could use these lettershapes as the basis for my antique typeface," he says. The two faces ended up being designed in tandem. While ITC Oldbook clearly captures the flavor of aged, uneven and imperfect printing, it also meets de Berranger's goal of being exceptionally readable in text sizes. Beginning with well-drawn characters was the key, and these were carefully modeled into the distressed forms. "The process was more difficult than I originally thought," says de Berranger. "The antique letters had to be tested and modified several times to work correctly." ITC Oldbook elegantly simulates antique printing in both text and display sizes. And while stroke weights are uneven and curves are irregular, the design has remarkably even color when set in blocks of text copy. Add to this the design's inherent legibility, and ITC Oldbook acquires a range far beyond replication of things old; it's suitable for any project that calls for warm and weathered typography. ITC Oldbook is available in roman and bold weights with complementary italic designs. Small caps, old style figures and a suite of alternate characters and ornaments provide additional flexibility and personality to the design."

Jeff Script is based on original handwriting of renowned Russian type designer Vladimir Yefimov. Vladimir designed a plenty of Cyrillic fonts that became the classical ones between contemporary Cyrillic type designs. Being extreme busy with type projects, he never had time to digitize his own script and this lacuna was filled by Gennady Fridman. The font was developed to the 60th anniversary of Maestro and released by ParaType in 2009.

Arnold Therhoernen. (Arnoldus ther Hornen, Drucker des Dictys , Arnold ter Hoernen, Arnold ther Hoernen, Arnoldus TherHornen.) Who was this guy? He was a printer active in the city of Cologne, having graduating from the university there. He learned his craft under Ulrich Zell. He printed books from 1470 to 1482 when the plague carried him off. Was he just another printer of the era? No, he brought out the first edition of the "Fasciculus temporum'' (The most popular work by a living author at that time.) And he was the first to use both a title page and page numbers. His page numbers, an idea probably suggested to him by Werner Rolevinck, were interesting in that they were centered half way down the page on the outer margin and were set in Roman Numerals.

Type designers are crazy people. Not crazy in the sense that they think we are Napoleon, but in the sense that the sky can be falling, wars tearing the world apart, disasters splitting the very ground we walk on, plagues circling continents to pick victims randomly, yet we will still perform our ever optimistic task of making some little spot of the world more appealing to the human eye. We ought to be proud of ourselves, I believe. Optimism is hard to come by these days. Regardless of our own personal reasons for doing what we do, the very thing we do is in itself an act of optimism and belief in the inherent beauty that exists within humanity. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to choose the amazing obscure profession I now have, wouldn't have been able to be humbled by the history that falls into my hands and slides in front of my eyes every day, wouldn't have been able to live and work across previously impenetrable cultural lines as I do now, and wouldn't have been able to raise my glass of Malbeck wine to toast every type designer who was before me, is with me, and will be after me. As recently as ten years ago, I wouldn't have been able to mean these words as I wrote them: It’s a small world. Yes, it is a small world, and a wonderfully complex one too. With so much information drowning our senses by the minute, it has become difficult to find clear meaning in almost anything. Something throughout the day is bound to make us feel even smaller in this small world. Most of us find comfort in a routine. Some of us find extended families. But in the end we are all Eleanor Rigbys, lonely on the inside and waiting for a miracle to come. If a miracle can make the world small, another one can perhaps give us meaning. And sometimes a miracle happens for a split second, then gets buried until a crazy type designer finds it. I was on my honeymoon in New York City when I first stumbled upon the letters that eventually started this Affair. A simple, content tourist walking down the streets formerly unknown to me except through pop music and film references. Browsing the shops of the city that made Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and a thousand other artists. Trying to chase away the tourist mentality, wondering what it would be like to actually live in the city of a billion tiny lights. Tourists don't go to libraries in foreign cities. So I walked into one. Two hours later I wasn't in New York anymore. I wasn't anywhere substantial. I was the crazy type designer at the apex of insanity. La La Land, alphabet heaven, curves and twirls and loops and swashes, ribbons and bows and naked letters. I'm probably not the very first person on this planet to be seduced into starting an Affair while on his honeymoon, but it is something to tease my better half about once in a while. To this day I can't decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book itself called for me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked off that shelf. And I looked at only one page in it before walking to the photocopier and cheating it with an Argentine coin, since I didn't have the American quarter it wanted. That was the beginning. I am now writing this after the Affair is over. And it was an Affair to remember, to pull a phrase. Right now, long after I have drawn and digitized and tested this alphabet, and long after I saw what some of this generation’s type designers saw in it, I have the luxury to speculate on what Affair really is, what made me begin and finish it, what cultural expressions it has, and so on. But in all honesty it wasn't like that. Much like in my Ministry Script experience, I was a driven man, a lover walking the ledge, an infatuated student following the instructions of his teacher while seeing her as a perfect angel. I am not exaggerating when I say that the letters themselves told me how to extend them. I was exploited by an alphabet, and it felt great. Unlike my experience with Ministry Script, where the objective was to push the technology to its limits, this Affair felt like the most natural and casual sequence of processions in the world – my hand following the grid, the grid following what my hand had already done – a circle of creation contained in one square computer cell, then doing it all over again. By contrast, it was the lousiest feeling in the world when I finally reached the conclusion that the Affair was done. What would I do now? Would any commitment I make from now on constitute a betrayal of these past precious months? I'm largely over all that now, of course. I like to think I'm a better man now because of the experience. Affair is an enormous, intricately calligraphic OpenType font based on a 9x9 photocopy of a page from a 1950s lettering book. In any calligraphic font, the global parameters for developing the characters are usually quite volatile and hard to pin down, but in this case it was particularly difficult because the photocopy was too gray and the letters were of different sizes, very intertwined and scan-impossible. So finishing the first few characters in order to establish the global rhythm was quite a long process, after which the work became a unique soothing, numbing routine by which I will always remember this Affair. The result of all the work, at least to the eyes of this crazy designer, is 1950s American lettering with a very Argentine wrapper. My Affair is infused with the spirit of filete, dulce de leche, yerba mate, and Carlos Gardel. Upon finishing the font I was fortunate enough that a few of my colleagues, great type designers and probably much saner than I am, agreed to show me how they envision my Affair in action. The beauty they showed me makes me feel small and yearn for the world to be even smaller now – at least small enough so that my international colleagues and I can meet and exchange stories over a good parrilla. These people, whose kindness is very deserving of my gratitude, and whose beautiful art is very deserving of your appreciation, are in no particular order: Corey Holms, Mariano Lopez Hiriart, Xavier Dupré, Alejandro Ros, Rebecca Alaccari, Laura Meseguer, Neil Summerour, Eduardo Manso, and the Doma group. You can see how they envisioned using Affair in the section of this booklet entitled A Foreign Affair. The rest of this booklet contains all the obligatory technical details that should come with a font this massive. I hope this Affair can bring you as much peace and satisfaction as it brought me, and I hope it can help your imagination soar like mine did when I was doing my duty for beauty.

Breeze is a fun font from Frank Marciuliano where the letters are formed like the sails from the boat. He may have been inspired from the sailboats which he sees on the walks along the shore on the Hudson River. There are two forms available. Left and right define the direction of the blowing wind.

A DISTANT SOIL is a classic bold and beautiful science fiction/fantasy comic book series by creator, writer, artist AND letterer Colleen Doran! A DISTANT SOIL is being remastered and re-released by those awfully nice chaps at Image Comics and Colleen commissioned Comicraft to create the definitive bold and beautiful Colleen Doran font, based on her original pen lettering, so that she might re-letter the series without excessive eye strain or hand cramp.